Frank Spangenberg
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Frank Spangenberg (born July 26, 1957) is an American police officer who garnered fame in 1990 when he set the five-day cumulative winnings record on the game show Jeopardy!, becoming the first person to win more than $100,000 in five days on the show.
Spangenberg, at the time a member of the New York City Transit Police Department (which is now the Transit Bureau of the New York City Police Department), won $102,597 in five days. At the time, winners were retired after five consecutive victories. Since the show doubled its dollar values in 2002 his record has been broken several times. However, when winnings are adjusted to match the current values ($205,194), Spangenberg's record holds for any player's first five games. (Though Ken Jennings's best five consecutive games beat this score ($221,200), Jennings also played seventy more regular season games than Spangenberg did.) Spangenberg also was fourth all time in single day winnings ($30,600) before the dollar values for the clues were doubled. He would be fifth in that statistic, as four of the top five single-day winnings took place before the dollar values were doubled — since the rule change, there have been thirteen times a player has won an adjusted $25,000 and only once a player has won more than an adjusted $30,000 (Ken Jennings with the record setting adjusted $37,500) in a single day. Shortly after he won his first five games in 1990, he appeared on Late Night with David Letterman and played the Jeopardy! home game on the show with Dave.
Spangenberg did not win the Tournament of Champions in 1990, losing to Larry McKnight in the semi-final, but he did win the show's 10th Anniversary Tournament in 1993. As a result of winning the 10th Anniversary Tournament, and his tournament-winning Final Jeopardy! response of "Who is Wendy Wasserstein?" he earned an invitation to dinner with the late-Pulitzer Prize-winning author [1]. Wasserstein said that she "wanted to meet the man that remembered her name." In the 2002 Jeopardy! Million Dollar Masters Tournament, he lost in the first round on a wrong Final Jeopardy response. In the 2005 Jeopardy! Ultimate Tournament of Champions, he won two games before narrowly losing a two-game semi-final to Jerome Vered, increasing his total winnings to $254,596.
While Spangenberg officially won $102,597 from his five days, he was restricted by a show cap of $75,000 (since removed), and $27,597 was donated to Gift of Love Hospice, operated by the Missionaries of Charity.
